One thing I love about the Holy Spirit is that you never know how and when she will show up! I expierenced a wonderful "God-sighting" this past Sunday as I led worship and preached at a coffeehouse-fair trade ministry in New Town St. Charles called The Bridge. The mission developer/pastor, The Rev. Libbie Reinking was doing a series on Creation and the theme for the day was water - Living Waters. Libbie saved this theme for me since I have worked a lot with image in the last couple of years as part of a new mission congregation by the same name (we ended the mission start due to my chronic migraines - you can read about our learnings here).

The Gospel reading was taken from John chapter 4 where Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well and offers her living water. I divided the reading into 3 parts – narrator, the woman and Jesus. As people arrived, a man, Derrick and his teenage daughter, Katie sat down and I asked the two of them to read the parts of Jesus and the woman. A little bit later, their wife/mom joined them. At the appointed time, Derrick and Katie stood up and did a beautiful job giving voice to the Scripture story.

Before I could start my sermon, Katie's mom, Judi, interrupted me and said, "I just have to share something with you about this passage. Katie is adopted from Serbia and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition in that country, the woman at the well is named 'Svetlana', so Katie read the part of Svetlana from her home country! And Svetlana is Katie's Serbian name!"

This reading meant a great deal to them as a family and there is no way I could have known this! We were all "wowed" by how the Holy Spirit showed up, and I was able to use the name Svetlana in my sermon which followed.

Later I read that Svetlana, which means light, is not only the name of this woman at the well, but that she is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church – St. Photina (from phos which is Greek for light). She preached the Gospel of Jesus, as did her 2 sons and 5 sisters. Under Emperor Nero (54-68 CE), known for his excessive cruelty against Christians, they were all imprisoned, tortured and martyred, but not before bringing many, many people to the light of faith in Jesus Christ, including Nero's daughter Domina. You can learn more about St. Photima here.

Like most women I know, I've gone through several phases in my relationship with my Mom. There were rebellious times when I didn’t want to be anything like her; there were grateful times when I recognized that some of her qualities are unmistakably a part of me, and there was everything in between.

Today, I feel a deeper connection to her 3 ½ years after her death and I wish so much that I could talk with her about that of which we never spoke. Things like how she prayed, the ways she experienced God, how her volunteerism was connected with her faith, what she gave up by being a stay-at-home Mom, what she would change about her choices if she could, what she would do exactly the same.

Six months after she died, I was at annual district church meeting called Synod Assembly. During the opening worship, we sang 3 of her favorite hymns. I could see her in my mind's eye, standing near the heavenly throne singing with me in her full beautiful voice. Quite suddenly, I saw a window into heaven that slid open from the inside and an awareness came over me that said, "your Mom had a call to ministry."

I stopped singing and sat down to process the gift of this awareness, while worship continued around me. I thought about all of the activities my Mom had done throughout her life and of course, so much of it was ministry: running our girl scout troop, writing the church newsletter, managing the hospital gift shop, leading suburban women's education, hosting parties and great fellowship events, and the list goes on. Had she been this vibrant woman today, her pastor would have encouraged her to go to seminary. And I thought I was the family weirdo who is the first and only pastor in my extended family.

Accepting with gratitude that I am more like her than not, came over me again a couple of weeks ago when my sisters and I went through her worldly possessions with the daunting task of deciding what to keep and what to give. We first tackled her dozens and dozens of cookbooks – we took pictures of the recipes she had marked in the books we gave away, and found more recipes tucked in the pages of many of them. But in one cookbook, I found a hand-written sheet of paper on which she had written a reflection about Silence. I had written the reflection about The Gift of Nothingness (which I posted last week, and you can read below on my blog or link to here) just a few months before. The language and the sentiments are remarkably similar. Here are her words:

Silence – the chance to eliminate all sounds so the blood which beats in your pulses

become the only conscious awareness you have

A quiet and peace return as you begin to relax and your blood pulsing begins once again to recede and be natural.

The quiet becomes manifest and your being fades into the stillness of the moment –

be it dawn, high noon, dusk or midnight.

Dawn – a new beginning, a chance to be aware, to feel, to experience, to begin new thoughts and ideas;

to re-establish the positive of yesterdays,

but keep open to the gifts and newness of today

High noon – bright day time, highlighting motives, thoughts, ideas–

no shadows- no hiding

dealing with what is visible, what blossoms open.

It looks like she started a reflection similar to praying the hours throughout the day, but she didn't have a chance to finish writing on the silence that comes at dusk and midnight.

We'll have a lot to discuss when it's my turn to join her in the choir around throne of God. Until then, I'm glad that death has not stopped me from learning more about her and loving her more deeply.

My two sisters, Pam and Julie and I gathered over Labor Day weekend to go through all of our Mom's worldly possessions (she died in January, 2012 at the age of 76). My dad wanted her belongings used - either by us or someone else through donations. The closets, dressers, cupboards and bookshelves were filled with the stuff of life that she loved and used over the years. It's been touching to find pieces of jewelry she wore in the 70's, favorite recipes flagged in her dozens of cookbooks, the linens she used for entertaining and dinner parties, and her collections of angels, bunnies, and travel souvenirs.

But even more momentous than these familiar items, is what we're learning about her that we never knew - that even our Dad never knew! We found a box full of coins that she collected which my dad had never seen. We found out that she had thought about being a physical therapist, especially for children - a dream she never pursued while raising her own four children while her husband traveled for work. We found books on writing and becoming published. Our mom wrote her own cookbook in the last decade of her life and she loved to write poems for Christmas cards and scrapbooks, but I didn't know she wanted to go into Creative Writing in high school, and that as an adult, she wanted to be published. We found a notebook full of journal-entries written at the end of December as a summary of what had happened over the previous year. These summaries included travel, time with family, holiday celebrations, her children's milestones, and "purchases for the home."

In addition to these journal entries, her writing was the most treasured gift she left us for we found a book she wrote after graduating from high school that told her life story in 12 chapters complete with pictures we had never seen. It's called, "Booties to Boots" (since she was 2 years old, her nickname was "Boots" - a name given to her by her dad whose big galoshes she loved to wear when he came home from work). The pages are type-written and taped to large sheets of black construction paper. We found out that she spent the first 3 weeks of her life in the hospital, that she and her brother received live bunnies for Easter one year (thus explaining her figurine bunny collection which I never quite understood!); we discovered that she was a cheerleader in middle-school and she and her friends called themselves "The 7 Dwarfs". We saw pictures of all 8 houses she lived in while growing up and moving with her dad's job. During her high school years, she had a group of 17 friends and we saw a picture of her on a double date with Dad and another couple who are still married! Mom wrote a whole chapter on "My God and Me" which described in detail, her experience of being Confirmed at the Bethany Lutheran Church in Lakefield, MN. This deeply spiritual side of my Mom is something I perceived and glimpsed at times, but it was not something she easily talked about. Her spirituality came through in her books, in her jewelry (crosses and angels), her many years as an active volunteer, the sacred way she wrote about relationships and church activities, and her fierce loyalty to many friends across the country who spanned every stage of her lifetime.

I'm grateful that we waited this long to go through her things. Because we were not racked by immediate grief, or under time-pressure to get it done for an impending move, we could take our time, savor memories, laugh and cry. I am left feeling more awed than ever at what a remarkable, faithful, amazing, smart and generous woman my Mom was and still is to me. The melancholy I feel over the parts of her I didn't know well, is balanced by gratitude for the chance to know her more fully and more deeply than I ever have before. She is still influencing me, shaping me and helping me grow up in how she reveals herself in what she left behind. I am closer to her than I ever have been and she continues to love generously and fiercely. St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians make more and more sense; of course love never ends.